Project: Holiday – Earning Extra Money To Go On Holiday

Project Holiday – Earning Extra Money To Go On Holiday

*Asterisks set out in this article relate to advertising and they indicate that the author receives a small share of sales through the related link.*

If you’ve been following me for a while, you’ll know that one of my goals for this year is to take my daughter on holiday. I have now paid off all of my debt, so it’s time to work on my other financial goals. In case you’re wondering, my other financial goals that I’ve shared in another post look something like this:

• Emergency fund
• Retirement fund
• Holiday with my daughter somewhere sunny
• Personal things!
• House deposit (I want to move)

As you can see, one of my goals is to take my daughter on holiday somewhere sunny – I know that I can take her somewhere in England, but somewhere abroad is what I’m aiming for. We aren’t too far from the beach here so it’s not like we can’t have sunny beach trips here – I just know that she would love to go abroad. She’s fascinated with other countries and cultures, and her favourite place in the world is the beach.

When I asked my husband about going on holiday this year he said that we can’t afford it. Pfft, I won’t be told that! I’m determined to take her, so it’s going to happen.

Unfortunately, as you will have seen if you’re following me on social media, I have lost one of my part time jobs. I had 2 part time jobs – one that I did in the evenings, and one I do a few times a week during the day. The one that I have now lost is my evening job. It’s made me a bit sad, because I’ve done it since my daughter was one, and was like a little lifeline for me.

Because I now only have one of my part time jobs, it is going to take a little bit longer to achieve these goals. However, I’m not doing too badly already. With my personal goals, I’ve saved up quite a bit already and got some of them crossed off, which I’m pleased about!

My goal for going on holiday is to save a minimum of £1000. I think realistically it will be more than that, but if I save up £1000 it will get me most of the way there if not all of the way, especially if I get a good deal.

My aim of getting an extra £1000 is not going to come from my usual income, but from the things that I do on the side – well that’s the aim anyway!

The ways in which I am planning on earning an extra £1000 to go towards are:

• Blogging*
• Dog boarding*
• Matched betting*
• Mystery shopping*

I’ve been really bad with pretty much all of these lately because I’ve been really busy with work and Uni, but now that one of the jobs has gone and Uni is almost over (end of May), I’m hoping that I will have more time and energy to throw at all of these. It certainly helps to have a goal to work towards, am I right?!

£1000 sounds like a pretty big number to achieve in a short space of time, which is why I’m going to look at it a bit differently. My thinking is that £1000 is just 100 lots of £10. So all that I have to do is earn £10 100 times. I don’t know about you, but that sounds much easier to me.

I’ve created a sheet where I’ve written in £10 on 100 rows. Every time that I earn £10, I will write down what I’ve earned it from. I’ll put it at the bottom of this post so that you can download it too if you like and join me in earning £1000 for your goal?

Blogging*

I’m going to be proactive and reach out to a couple of companies to see if they would be interested in doing sponsored posts with me.

The other ways that I can earn money from blogging quickly for this goal is with affiliate links. I’m really bad with these because I don’t really think about it, I tend to just write whatever I think will be helpful and forget to add links. I also need to work on my promotion/marketing strategy.

Dog boarding*

Hmm. Not sure how I will improve on this one much, it just seems to be the luck of the draw. I bid on jobs that I want, but I don’t tend to book in advance – I usually just do ones for that month. I could maybe charge less and get more jobs…but I think that I will just stick to what I am doing. Higher fees mean less work after all!

Matched betting*

I’ve been really slack with this for months now. It’s a shame because it’s a great way of earning extra, but I don’t have a huge kitty so it’s a slow process which is what puts me off I think. I’m so impatient! This month I’m going to try and do more for definite.

Mystery shopping*

Again something that I’ve been slacking on majorly. The fees with mystery shopping aren’t generally great, but occasionally there are higher paying jobs that require a little bit more effort. I’m going to check the various mystery shopping sites every day to ensure I get to see the best ones as they come in.

Wedding hire

This is my new business, that I’ve literally just started. I have some stock, I’ve set up a website and some social media for it, so I just need to work on promoting it and getting some professional photos of the stock. I may need to do some wedding fayres too – which I would love!

I’m also going to be doing surveys* and selling on eBay – I was going to start re-selling but I don’t have any money spare for this currently as I’ve started up the new business. There’s also a couple more side businesses that I want to start up too (I know, I’m insane).

Another thing that I can try and do is reach out to see if anyone would like any freelance writing work done for them. I love writing, and can get a bunch of it done quite quickly depending on the subject. I was thinking before about social media management, but realised quickly that it was not something that I was interested in doing.

I hope that I will reach the £1000 quickly, but we shall see! I will of course share my progress with you over on Instagram and when the goal has been reached I will also be able to share the breakdown of how I achieved it.

What do you think, do you want to join me? What are you saving up for?